Dear Sir
Clive James blew apart his carefully cultivated jocular TV image with his powerful reaction to the tragedy in Bali (Don’t blame the west G2, 16 Oct). Arguing that the atrocity was clearly the result of militant fundamentalism, and, not as intellectuals would have us believe, the inevitable consequence of the hatred the west has brought on itself.
Surely there is a link. Helping nations escape from poverty is a prerequisite to facilitate mass education. Such fanatical terrorism thrives on unthinking emotional mass support. We moved away from Old Testament Christian fundamentalism when the people started to think for themselves.
Bali is predominately Hindu, whereas the rest of Indonesia is largely Moslem. So here we have a second worrying escalation of a conflict, which is already waiting to explode across the sub continent. The relative prosperity of the residents of Bali is based on tourism, which will now disappear. They too will be angry at the Moslems.
Convinced that mass education was the long-term answer I turned to the front page. There, post Bali polls showed a massive emotional swing of support for a war against Iraq, in spite of its dubious justification, even if the Security Council can be coerced into support. The damage caused by deployment of our, oh so intelligent, weapons of mass destruction will far outweigh the destruction and misery caused by a few diabolically well-aimed terrorist bombs over the past year.
Albert Camus writing after the Second World War concluded we would never defeat evil, ‘le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparait jamais’. It was no accident that he chose an infectious illness (the plague) as his metaphor for evil, and a doctor to lead the struggle against it. We need to keep thinking or we will make matters far worse.
Brian Corbett
62 Radyr Avenue
Mayals
Swansea
SA3 5DT
01792 424702
BALI IN CONTEXT 1600 words putting events into an Indonesian context. Paints a picture of Indonesian life from trekking and six years correspondence, before posing political questions about terrorism. Interested? A prompt response please.
I have some good quality supporting photographs on slide and print film.
Brian Corbett
01792 424702
‘A tale of cultures, religions, personal relationships and western politics.’
For all the media coverage one seldom hears about the even bigger disaster for the people of Bali. They too will have had severe casualties in the explosions, but, unlike us, the able bodied cannot run away. I searched my email daily hoping for a reply from my young Indonesian friend Juneter, now resident in Kuta.
Things had been looking up for him as he turned his fluent English to good effect by being paid in dollars for teaching the children of ex-patriots. Now they will flee like the tourists, and he will be looking for work in the only Hindu island in Indonesia, whose economy will have been devastated by a couple of diabolically well aimed car bombs.
It takes me back six years. We had already adopted the young persons backpacking mode of travel for holidays, and decided to celebrate retirement with two months trekking in Sumatra. We met Juneter on our very first bus ride, from the capital Medan. He was returning home to Brastagi from college, showed us his English homework and then explained the complicated genealogical relationship between the five ethnic groups of his people, the Karo Batak.
Next day he took us to his village and showed us around the now vacant village king’s house. The birthing seat was outside, in full view, to ensure confidence in the succession! On the surrender of Japan in 1945, Sukarno, their initially democratic nationalist leader and father of the current president Megawati, declared unilateral independence. Village kings were deposed and replaced by democratically elected headmen.
We learnt the significance of the Upper, Middle and Lower worlds. Humans lived in the middle world, which is why the houses were on stilts. You climbed into the houses by three steps at the front and left by five steps at the rear. Eight related families shared a house, but the girls had to marry into a different ethnic group. At seventeen the lads went to a separate boy’s house, and wooed the girls in the windows like troubadours. The left handrail was much higher than the other. So on every entry you touched the bottom end on the right to pay respects to the Earth God and the top of the left rail for the Sky God.
Burning cigarettes, held high on the splayed out ends of sticks, were placed around a nearby bubbling, steaming, sulphurous crater, offerings to the god of the volcano. This was animist country.
Photographs of Batak women at a wedding ceremony still shine down from our walls, their red beetle-nut stained lips wreathed in the most enormous smiles. No money changed hands. He just wanted to make friends, to show us his culture. That as we were to discover was typical of Sumatrans, the friendliest, most welcoming people we have met. Anyone who trekked in Asia at that time will remember the whole region in this way - outside the big cities anyway.
We crossed the country to Bukittingi and for the first time were immersed in Muslim culture. Junizer was returning from school on a bus crowded with children. He invited us to walk a couple of miles through the jungle to his village. His mother ran the local coffee shop, which served the social function of a village pub in this alcohol free culture. She greeted us warmly, gave us the most delicious coffee and cakes, and refused payment. He took us on a tour of his beautiful tropical village, delighting in showing the way coffee trees and all kinds of vegetables were laid out decoratively, as though in flowerbeds. The piece de resistance was six water mills each lifting and dropping mechanised pestles into mortars. Two women, covered in white dust, used hand sieves to remove lumps from the rice flour. Other mills ground coffee. ‘I’ll have to leave you now. I have an exam tomorrow’ Junizer explained. ‘Can you find your way back to the road?’
On then up the little travelled west coast to Tapaktuan. ‘Go to the water falls at Air Dingin tomorrow, it’s a school holiday, everyone’s going there’, we were told. Right enough the place was alive with pupils celebrating their very last day of school. Next year Lela was going to university in Banda Aceh. ‘He comes from Vietnam and Chun Ying is from China’, she enthused about the racial diversity. Girls were just as outgoing as the boys, and rather better at English. We scrambled a couple of hundred feet up a rocky path to the side of the seven cascades. Everyone was doing it, stopping in groups to picnic, or to shower in full dress in the pools. Then back to the cafĂ© on the beach and several hours of chat about their future plans and the difference in our lifestyles. ’You have no religion. You mean you are still an animist?’ queried Lela. ‘Well not exactly …’ But animist sounds better than humanist: it’s less pretentious. If I’d had a cigarette I would have lit a candle for the volcano.
Back home I unthinkingly sent Junizer a Christmas card. ‘I forgot to tell you I am a Muslim’, he wrote back, ‘but that’s OK, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all’. It is a predominantly Muslim country, more relaxed than some no doubt, which made the fact seem irrelevant, and so easy to forget. We do after all share humanity.
Tragedy struck us suddenly after an equally memorable trek in northern India. A severe outbreak of Rheumatoid Arthritis left my wife unable to walk at all without severe pain.
Tragedy struck Asia too. Financial collapse started with Thailand and quickly spread across the whole of Southeast Asia. Juneter wrote to say the price of rice, their staple food, had trebled overnight. Imagine what that meant to people whose income was the local equivalent of a dollar a day - when they were working. People were starving. His illiterate mother, a farmer, tilled the fields with hand tools - so they survived, better than most.
Then he wrote again, ‘I just don’t know what to do. My mother can no longer support my studies. I have never asked for money before but I have no one else to turn to.’ We sent him a couple of hundred pounds which almost made him a rupiah millionaire overnight, for their currency, already almost worthless on the world market, had collapsed to a fifth of its previous value. ‘Oh thank you. I have never dreamed of so much money’, wrote the delighted Juneter. A few years later we proudly put his graduation photograph in our family album.
Junizer wrote to say their coffee shop had burnt down. We assumed the fire had resulted from the widespread looting and firing then spreading through Indonesia. But thank goodness this fire was just an accident. ‘Don’t believe all the bad and horrible news about Indonesia’, he wrote. We were able to send them a rather poor photograph of his mother in the kitchen. Back came the response, ‘my mother cried when she saw the picture, it’s in the family album now, you and Joan have joined our family.’
Joan made a wonderful recovery with the help of two artificial knees and above all by remission of the disease. A month ago we backpacked in Italy and concluded that we were fit enough to resume our travels in less developed countries. But the world has changed dramatically in six years. Nepal is off bounds, destabilised following a terrible shooting in the Royal family, so is India due to the confrontation with Pakistan over Kashmir. I got out the tattered Lonely Planet guide and started to contemplate an easy first trip to meet up with Juneter in Bali!
Then tragedy strikes Indonesia again, car bombs – more devastating than any in Northern Ireland, lack of warning and inflammable buildings make the difference. Tension here ratchets up alarmingly, the polls report a violent swing. A majority of the British people now back war with Iraq, when quite the reverse would seem a more rational reaction, one reflecting the futility of trying to win this diffuse battle against terrorism by military force.
What is going wrong with a world in which personal relationships are as secure as ever, but democratic politicians are increasingly mistrusted? They should be part of the solution, but, increasingly spinning with forked tongues and in league with big business, they appear to be part of the problem. The great merit of democracy should be to allow justice and peaceful change.
Some terrorism starts as a reaction to unjust government and state terrorism. Think of the original Irish freedom struggle, or the Palestinians of today. What are the motives of these current terrorists? Is it Islamic States, or personal power that they seek? Is it a crusade against our lax, increasingly winner takes all, way of life, or is it social justice for their people?
Camus in his fine allegorical novel La Peste, reflecting on the Second World War, argues that evil, The Plague, is carried by us all and would always be with us. He concluded that to counter it effectively, honesty is essential. Indonesia deserves that.
BRIAN CORBETT 25 October 2002
Clive James blew apart his carefully cultivated jocular TV image with his powerful reaction to the tragedy in Bali (Don’t blame the west G2, 16 Oct). Arguing that the atrocity was clearly the result of militant fundamentalism, and, not as intellectuals would have us believe, the inevitable consequence of the hatred the west has brought on itself.
Surely there is a link. Helping nations escape from poverty is a prerequisite to facilitate mass education. Such fanatical terrorism thrives on unthinking emotional mass support. We moved away from Old Testament Christian fundamentalism when the people started to think for themselves.
Bali is predominately Hindu, whereas the rest of Indonesia is largely Moslem. So here we have a second worrying escalation of a conflict, which is already waiting to explode across the sub continent. The relative prosperity of the residents of Bali is based on tourism, which will now disappear. They too will be angry at the Moslems.
Convinced that mass education was the long-term answer I turned to the front page. There, post Bali polls showed a massive emotional swing of support for a war against Iraq, in spite of its dubious justification, even if the Security Council can be coerced into support. The damage caused by deployment of our, oh so intelligent, weapons of mass destruction will far outweigh the destruction and misery caused by a few diabolically well-aimed terrorist bombs over the past year.
Albert Camus writing after the Second World War concluded we would never defeat evil, ‘le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparait jamais’. It was no accident that he chose an infectious illness (the plague) as his metaphor for evil, and a doctor to lead the struggle against it. We need to keep thinking or we will make matters far worse.
Brian Corbett
62 Radyr Avenue
Mayals
Swansea
SA3 5DT
01792 424702
BALI IN CONTEXT 1600 words putting events into an Indonesian context. Paints a picture of Indonesian life from trekking and six years correspondence, before posing political questions about terrorism. Interested? A prompt response please.
I have some good quality supporting photographs on slide and print film.
Personal Notes
As an engineering graduate of Imperial College and Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, I was author of several international conference papers in computer control of industrial processes. Now I am a recent OAP who writes a bit. My current interests include independent travel, often with my wife and a rucksack in Asia and Europe, politics (as an observer), languages (European and Asian), ball sports, ‘modern’ jazz, photography, and losing money on technology stocks!Brian Corbett
01792 424702
BALI IN CONTEXT
‘A tale of cultures, religions, personal relationships and western politics.’
For all the media coverage one seldom hears about the even bigger disaster for the people of Bali. They too will have had severe casualties in the explosions, but, unlike us, the able bodied cannot run away. I searched my email daily hoping for a reply from my young Indonesian friend Juneter, now resident in Kuta.
Things had been looking up for him as he turned his fluent English to good effect by being paid in dollars for teaching the children of ex-patriots. Now they will flee like the tourists, and he will be looking for work in the only Hindu island in Indonesia, whose economy will have been devastated by a couple of diabolically well aimed car bombs.
It takes me back six years. We had already adopted the young persons backpacking mode of travel for holidays, and decided to celebrate retirement with two months trekking in Sumatra. We met Juneter on our very first bus ride, from the capital Medan. He was returning home to Brastagi from college, showed us his English homework and then explained the complicated genealogical relationship between the five ethnic groups of his people, the Karo Batak.
Next day he took us to his village and showed us around the now vacant village king’s house. The birthing seat was outside, in full view, to ensure confidence in the succession! On the surrender of Japan in 1945, Sukarno, their initially democratic nationalist leader and father of the current president Megawati, declared unilateral independence. Village kings were deposed and replaced by democratically elected headmen.
We learnt the significance of the Upper, Middle and Lower worlds. Humans lived in the middle world, which is why the houses were on stilts. You climbed into the houses by three steps at the front and left by five steps at the rear. Eight related families shared a house, but the girls had to marry into a different ethnic group. At seventeen the lads went to a separate boy’s house, and wooed the girls in the windows like troubadours. The left handrail was much higher than the other. So on every entry you touched the bottom end on the right to pay respects to the Earth God and the top of the left rail for the Sky God.
Burning cigarettes, held high on the splayed out ends of sticks, were placed around a nearby bubbling, steaming, sulphurous crater, offerings to the god of the volcano. This was animist country.
Photographs of Batak women at a wedding ceremony still shine down from our walls, their red beetle-nut stained lips wreathed in the most enormous smiles. No money changed hands. He just wanted to make friends, to show us his culture. That as we were to discover was typical of Sumatrans, the friendliest, most welcoming people we have met. Anyone who trekked in Asia at that time will remember the whole region in this way - outside the big cities anyway.
We crossed the country to Bukittingi and for the first time were immersed in Muslim culture. Junizer was returning from school on a bus crowded with children. He invited us to walk a couple of miles through the jungle to his village. His mother ran the local coffee shop, which served the social function of a village pub in this alcohol free culture. She greeted us warmly, gave us the most delicious coffee and cakes, and refused payment. He took us on a tour of his beautiful tropical village, delighting in showing the way coffee trees and all kinds of vegetables were laid out decoratively, as though in flowerbeds. The piece de resistance was six water mills each lifting and dropping mechanised pestles into mortars. Two women, covered in white dust, used hand sieves to remove lumps from the rice flour. Other mills ground coffee. ‘I’ll have to leave you now. I have an exam tomorrow’ Junizer explained. ‘Can you find your way back to the road?’
On then up the little travelled west coast to Tapaktuan. ‘Go to the water falls at Air Dingin tomorrow, it’s a school holiday, everyone’s going there’, we were told. Right enough the place was alive with pupils celebrating their very last day of school. Next year Lela was going to university in Banda Aceh. ‘He comes from Vietnam and Chun Ying is from China’, she enthused about the racial diversity. Girls were just as outgoing as the boys, and rather better at English. We scrambled a couple of hundred feet up a rocky path to the side of the seven cascades. Everyone was doing it, stopping in groups to picnic, or to shower in full dress in the pools. Then back to the cafĂ© on the beach and several hours of chat about their future plans and the difference in our lifestyles. ’You have no religion. You mean you are still an animist?’ queried Lela. ‘Well not exactly …’ But animist sounds better than humanist: it’s less pretentious. If I’d had a cigarette I would have lit a candle for the volcano.
Back home I unthinkingly sent Junizer a Christmas card. ‘I forgot to tell you I am a Muslim’, he wrote back, ‘but that’s OK, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all’. It is a predominantly Muslim country, more relaxed than some no doubt, which made the fact seem irrelevant, and so easy to forget. We do after all share humanity.
Tragedy struck us suddenly after an equally memorable trek in northern India. A severe outbreak of Rheumatoid Arthritis left my wife unable to walk at all without severe pain.
Tragedy struck Asia too. Financial collapse started with Thailand and quickly spread across the whole of Southeast Asia. Juneter wrote to say the price of rice, their staple food, had trebled overnight. Imagine what that meant to people whose income was the local equivalent of a dollar a day - when they were working. People were starving. His illiterate mother, a farmer, tilled the fields with hand tools - so they survived, better than most.
Then he wrote again, ‘I just don’t know what to do. My mother can no longer support my studies. I have never asked for money before but I have no one else to turn to.’ We sent him a couple of hundred pounds which almost made him a rupiah millionaire overnight, for their currency, already almost worthless on the world market, had collapsed to a fifth of its previous value. ‘Oh thank you. I have never dreamed of so much money’, wrote the delighted Juneter. A few years later we proudly put his graduation photograph in our family album.
Junizer wrote to say their coffee shop had burnt down. We assumed the fire had resulted from the widespread looting and firing then spreading through Indonesia. But thank goodness this fire was just an accident. ‘Don’t believe all the bad and horrible news about Indonesia’, he wrote. We were able to send them a rather poor photograph of his mother in the kitchen. Back came the response, ‘my mother cried when she saw the picture, it’s in the family album now, you and Joan have joined our family.’
Joan made a wonderful recovery with the help of two artificial knees and above all by remission of the disease. A month ago we backpacked in Italy and concluded that we were fit enough to resume our travels in less developed countries. But the world has changed dramatically in six years. Nepal is off bounds, destabilised following a terrible shooting in the Royal family, so is India due to the confrontation with Pakistan over Kashmir. I got out the tattered Lonely Planet guide and started to contemplate an easy first trip to meet up with Juneter in Bali!
Then tragedy strikes Indonesia again, car bombs – more devastating than any in Northern Ireland, lack of warning and inflammable buildings make the difference. Tension here ratchets up alarmingly, the polls report a violent swing. A majority of the British people now back war with Iraq, when quite the reverse would seem a more rational reaction, one reflecting the futility of trying to win this diffuse battle against terrorism by military force.
What is going wrong with a world in which personal relationships are as secure as ever, but democratic politicians are increasingly mistrusted? They should be part of the solution, but, increasingly spinning with forked tongues and in league with big business, they appear to be part of the problem. The great merit of democracy should be to allow justice and peaceful change.
Some terrorism starts as a reaction to unjust government and state terrorism. Think of the original Irish freedom struggle, or the Palestinians of today. What are the motives of these current terrorists? Is it Islamic States, or personal power that they seek? Is it a crusade against our lax, increasingly winner takes all, way of life, or is it social justice for their people?
Camus in his fine allegorical novel La Peste, reflecting on the Second World War, argues that evil, The Plague, is carried by us all and would always be with us. He concluded that to counter it effectively, honesty is essential. Indonesia deserves that.
BRIAN CORBETT 25 October 2002
